Krampus events are springing up around the US – raising the question of why? What draws Americans to this figure indigenous to the Alpine regions of Austria, Bavaria, and southern Germany?
The answer lies most obviously in the human need for ritual – that is, events organized on a calendrical or ‘natural’ rhythm that thus bypass the increasingly insistent presence of holidays controlled (and often created) by corporate interests. While not created by corporations, Christmas certainly seems to have been hijacked by them. In his book about the Krampus as an integral part of “the old, dark Christmas,” Al Ridenour points out that this commercialism may be a particular problem for those Americans “who came of age in the rebellious punk-rock era.” For this generation, the ‘savage’ Krampus “seems to express the requisite countercultural contempt for the Coca-Cola guzzling, bloated patriarch of all that is consumerist and parental.”[i] Krampus represents a darker seam of US culture, one that seeks a form of ‘authenticity’ in the face of a stultifying consumerism—a dark counterpoint to artificial light.
The Origins of Krampus
In search of this more authentic Christmas ritual, Americans have turned to a figure rooted in the culture of Austria, Bavaria, and southern Germany. There is, of course, something of a paradox in this turn, as the Krampus is explicitly a local figure, one who gained fearsome power not by being disseminated on the Internet but by its rootedness in a particular place. Ridenour makes the important point that the vitality of the Krampus tradition in Austria and Bavaria “lies not in its wide diffusion but in its isolated growth within a sort of cultural hothouse enforced by Alpine topography.” The “historic obstacles,” he continues, “involved in traversing the Alps focused and preserved Krampus customs in their highly localized form.”[ii]
Krampusnacht in Jim Thorpe, Kemmerer Park, December 4, 2021
Some US scholars wrote about the Krampus traditions in Europe before they became widely-known in the early 2000s. Maurice Bruce’s 1958 essay in the journal Folklore, for instance, describes the ‘Nikolospiel’ as celebrated in Austria’s Styrian valley, where the benign Saint Nikolaus is followed by “the black, shaggy, goat-horned figure of the Krampus” who “rattles the chains that hang from his wrists, and brandishes a bundle of birch-twigs which he wields with more energy than discrimination.”[iii] According to Bruce, the “styrian Krampus has lost none of his pagan wildness. He is still the black He-Goat of the Witches”; he is a “terrifying, elemental figure.”[iv]
Writing almost twenty years later in 1977 about the tradition of Krampus house-visits in Altirdning, Austria, John J. Honigmann also describes a figure so terrifying and unruly that local church organizations were starting to exert control over its rampage. Honigmann witnessed Saint Nicholas and Krampus paying a visit to a home on December 5, Saint Nicholas’s Eve, and he described how Krampus “never uttered intelligible words, but in inhuman fashion only growled angrily.” The entire visit (despite the presence of the benign, gift-bearing Saint Nicholas) was defined by “the almost constant menacing threats of the irrepressible, noisy Krampus.”[v] Honigmann’s essay takes up the very question of this menace, of “why masked Krampuses get carried away by their role to the point of becoming troublesome and in need of external control.”[vi] Honigmann’s answer is the mask itself – but it’s clear that the “troublesome” behavior of Krampus is just inherent to his nature, part of his purpose. That’s the point. Krampus’s role is to balance the beneficent Saint Nicholas, to bring punishment rather than reward, to remind people by his constant menace of their own darker impulses.
It is this figure that has been so avidly adopted by Americans since, according to Ridenour, the early 2000s, when Krampus became accessible to the English-speaking world via scans of pre-World War 1 postcards that began to appear on the Internet.[vii] Krampuslauf – or Krampus runs – began springing up in American cities after 2011, including in Portland, Columbia, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Dallas. Ridenour notes that the largest is in Bloomington, Indiana, “with an estimated 31,100 spectators attending in 2015.”[viii]
But, are Krampus events in the US achieving any sense of meaningful ritual – displaced, as they are, from the Alpine origins?
Krampusnacht in Jim Thorpe
On December 4, 2021, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, was the site of Black Forest Krampusnacht, organized by the Carbon County Chamber of Commerce.[ix] The festival ran from 11 am until 4 pm at Kemmerer Park, with a full slate of events that included Kids’ Crafts, Find the Fairy Homes, and Find the Fairy Tale Characters. The central event, of course, was the Krampuslauf, with costumed participants gathering across from the Harry Packer Mansion at 3:15 and proceeding on the Krampuslauf through the park at 3:30. (See a local news report, along with video, here.) The event was well-attended, and roughly thirty or forty people dressed as Krampus and participated in the run itself. It was a more sedate affair than its name might suggest, a walk more than a run, as participants followed Saint Nicholas parading down the winding paths of the small wooded park. See a video of it on the Jim Thorpe, PA Visitor Information Center Facebook page here. The run itself was over after about fifteen minutes or so, and then Kampuses could be seen scattered across the park posing for photographs – including with small children who, for the most part, didn’t seem terribly afraid. They wound their way through a park that included food, a beer and wine garden, and – by far the most bustling part – stalls at which people sold goods (crafts), including t-shirts and sweatshirts of the event (which sold out fairly quickly).
Krampusnacht in Jim Thorpe, Kemmerer Park, December 4, 2021
From this description, it should be evident that the ‘wildness’ of the Krampus was almost completely erased in this very managed event. It was held during daylight hours in a space set up to cater to children – organized by the county Chamber of Commerce, replete with shopping opportunities. The Krampuslauf—even though it was undoubtedly, itself, a non-commercial event—was coordinated by a woman who sounded a bullhorn to get things going and to indicate the start of the parade. Little ‘wildness’ seemed to seep out from this contained, staged, and daylight event.
That said, it was definitely a positive alternative to a Saturday spent at the mall. A local polka band was playing, the stalls were run by local artisans, and the people who attended (as gauged by responses on the event’s Facebook page) genuinely enjoyed it. And, despite pointing out its limitations, so did I. But I could not avoid the profound presence of the management – the containment – of what, in traditional Austria, has been an expressly ‘wild’ ritual.
Krampus in Kemmerer Park
Rituals are always rooted in place – and this particular ritual is no exception. Indeed, the particular spatial politics of this event, and of Jim Thorpe itself, were what left the most lasting impression on me.
Jim Thorpe (then called Mauch Chunk) was born and flourished on anthracite coal, which was discovered in Summit Hill in 1791.[x] Coal made Jim Thorpe very rich – or, it made some of those who came to Jim Thorpe to exploit anthracite coal very rich. Perhaps the best known of Jim Thorpe’s multi-millionaires is Asa Packer, who arrived in Mauch Chunk in 1833 and soon owned land and mines and eventually launched the Lehigh Valley Railroad.[xi] Packer and his family were not alone, and local history touts the fact that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Mauch Chunk was home to at least half of the nation’s millionaires. According to the local guide on the evening ghost tour, for instance, in the late 1880s, nineteen of the twenty-six millionaires in the US lived in Jim Thorpe.
Jim Thorpe’s geography still reflects its past – a past inevitably demarcated into the very wealthy owners of the coal mines and railroads and those who worked in the mines and on the railroad (and canal). And this is where we come back to the spatial meanings of Krampusnacht in Kemmerer Park. The park bears the name of the one of the many coal barons who lived in Mauch Chunk; it’s “named after Mahlon S. Kemmerer, a local leader in the coal industry. The park is built on his former estate.” The park is located, moreover, just below the two most famous mansions in the town -the Harry Packer Mansion and the Asa Packer Mansion (now a museum), two mansions that together embody the concentration of wealth in the town.
Below Kemmerer Park is the railroad and the Lehigh River, along with the site of the upper stretch of the Lehigh Canal. This was, of course, the hub for all the coal that made the millionaires of the nineteenth-century US. Kemmerer Park, in other words, lies between the locales of wealth and work – although beneath it are the vestiges of wealth in the form of the Kemmerer estate.
The Lehigh River below Jim Thorpe
This location seems significant for a ritual – the Krampuslauf – that can serve as a means of releasing rebellious energies: the park is a liminal space between the owners and wealth and the workers, between the rich and those who made them rich. Significantly, the Krampus has been a part of working-class opposition, leading the way, for instance, in a 2011 Solidarity Funeral Procession and Rally in Madison, Wisconsin. One Krampus held a sign that called out the governor, Scott Walker – its inscription warning Walker that Krampus needed to speak to him.
There were no signs of rebellion at the 2021 Jim Thorpe Krampusnacht, however. The Krampuses processed in an orderly fashion at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce, doing their part to draw folks to the area to spend money, failing to warn or scare any of the ‘naughty’. Despite that, it did draw power, however unwittingly, from its location and its history. Krampuslaufs originate in Austria, but their meanings will inevitably change and evolve as the ritual migrates to other parts of the globe, other places that have their own unique histories inevitably layered into their landscapes.
Notes
[i] Al Ridenour, The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil (Feral House, 2016), p. 2.
[ii] Ridenour, Krampus, p. 14.
[iii] Maurice Bruce, “The Krampus in Styria,” Folklore, vol. 69, no. 1 (1958), p. 45.
[iv] Bruce, “Krampus,” p. 47.
[v] John J. Honigmann, “The Masked Face,” Ethos, vol. 5, no. 3 (1977), p. 266.
[vi] Honigmann, “Masked,” p. 268.
[vii] Ridenour, Krampus, p. 8.
[viii] Ridenour, Krampus, p. 9. The organizers have declared that the 2021 Krampus run in Bloomington will be the last.
[viii] Ridenour, Krampus, p. 2.
[ix] It’s worth wondering here why rituals in Pennsylvania aren’t organized around Belsnickel, introduced in the early 1800s to “backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania” by German immigrants. See Ridenour, Krampus, p. 5 and 248.
[x] John H. Drury and Joan Gilbert, Jim Thorpe (Mauch Chunk) (Arcadia Publishing, 2001), p. 9.
[xi] Drury and Gilbert, Jim Thorpe, p. 37. Asa Packer also founded Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, where I work.
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